UK - About 2 million elderly people in the UK are on at least seven different medications and at risk of potentially life-threatening harm from interactions between the drugs or side-effects from pills that are no longer right for them. Older people are being let down by a healthcare system that is allowing medicines to do more harm than good, according to a report from Age UK. One in five prescriptions for elderly people living at home are inappropriate, it said. Care home residents take an average of at least eight medicines, with a one in 10 risk of a mistake when the drugs are prescribed or given to them. More is not always better, said the report. Doctors tend to add new tablets each time an elderly person develops another health condition, but without stopping the old ones. The more medicines elderly people take, the greater their risk of having a fall, which can put them in hospital.

USA - The Eternals will include the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first openly gay character. Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, confirmed the news during an interview with Good Morning America. "He's married, he's got a family, and that is just part of who he is," Feige said, though he did not clarify which character he was discussing. The Eternals is one of Marvel's most ambitious projects making its way to the big screen, with a star-studded cast that includes Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Richard Madden, Kit Harington, Gemma Chan, Kumail Nanjiani, Brian Tyree Henry and more. Feige's confirmation follows Disney's big presentation at D23 Expo over the weekend, where Marvel announced additional cast members joining The Eternals and revealed concept art previewing the ensemble's superhero looks in the film.

ISRAEL - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday ordered his top defense aides to brief chief political rival Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party on security developments, an extremely rare move reflecting threats of war on multiple fronts. The premier’s military secretary Avi Blut and National Security Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat were told to update Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement.

GERMANY - German business confidence has fallen for a fifth consecutive month and hit a nearly seven-year low, a closely watched survey found Monday — adding to mounting worries that Europe’s biggest economy is headed for a recession. The Ifo institute said its monthly confidence index declined to 94.3 points in August from 95.8 in July. Managers’ views of the current situation and the outlook for the next six months both worsened. It was the lowest reading for the index since November 2012. In the manufacturing sector, “the last time that industrial companies demonstrated such pessimism was in the crisis year of 2009,” Fuest said. He added that “not a single ray of light was to be seen in any of Germany’s key industries.”

UK - British prime minister Boris Johnson has reiterated his determination that Brexit takes place on October 31st at a G7 meeting with Donald Tusk, President of the European Council. President Tusk is at the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Biarritz, France, despite the fact he does not represent a G7 country, and holds his unelected position as a European Union functionary despite the opposition of the government in his native Poland.

EUROPE - With their ‘inaccurate’ coverage of his meetings with world leaders, the US ‘fake news’ media have become the laughing stock of the G7 summit in France, US President Donald Trump has claimed. “In France we are all laughing at how knowingly inaccurate the US reporting of events and conversations at the G-7 is,” Trump tweeted on Sunday evening. “These Leaders, and many others, are getting a major case study of Fake News at it’s (sic) finest!” Starting his Sunday morning routine by slamming the mainstream media’s ‘anti-Trump bias,’ the US president spent the rest of the afternoon tweeting how he and his opinions are valued, supported, and respected by the other leaders.

EUROPE - The president says he thinks China wants to make a deal and indicates he is open to meeting with Iran’s president. In a joint news conference following the conclusion of the G-7 summit, French President Emmanuel Macron and President Trump discussed US trade negotiations with China. President Trump struck a conciliatory tone on the final day of the Group of Seven summit, where he faced pressure from French President Emmanuel Macron to de-escalate the trade war with China and ease tensions with Iran. At a joint news conference with Mr Macron, Mr Trump said he was open to meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. The remarks came hours after the Iranian leader signaled that he too was open to talks, and Mr Macron said he hoped the two leaders would speak in the coming weeks.

ISRAEL - US President Donald Trump hinted on Monday that parts of his long-awaited Mideast peace plan may be released before the September 17 election, leading to some speculation that this may include elements of the plan that may help Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the polls. Speaking on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in France before a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel al-Sisi, Trump said that while the entire plan would not be released before the election, “I think you may see what the deal is before the election.”

USA - Are things about to break loose in a major way? At the end of last week, the trade war between the United States and China escalated dramatically, and investors all over the globe really started freaking out. Unfortunately, developments over the weekend have only made things worse, and that means that this could be a very “interesting” week for global financial markets. As I write this article, stock prices around the world are plunging, the price of gold is spiking and the Chinese yuan is crashing. There is clearly a lot of fear out there right now, and at this point even CNBC is warning that the last week of this month “could be highly volatile”…

EUROPE - The Eurozone is heading for an economic crisis far bigger than the 2011-2012 disaster and the German Chancellor has been urged to drastically increase domestic spending to save the 19 EU member states from plunging into recession. The Eurozone is headed for a “fresh crisis”, according to economist Liam Halligan as he warns that only Germany can save the monetary union from collapse. Germany, one of the eurozone’s largest economies is headed for a recession and Mr Halligan says that the country needs to make significant changes to fiscal policy to stimulate its own economy and the broader region. This, he says, will “spark growth elsewhere” and help prevent the “looming” eurozone crisis. But Mr Halligan, writing in the Sunday Telegraph suggests that German Chancellor Angela Merkel should “take steps to boost the economy”, by investing more at home and boosting both government and consumer spending. Such a policy won’t be easily adopted however, due to the Government’s enshrined policy of staunch fiscal restraint.

AFGHANISTAN - The Taliban maintained on Monday that a peace agreement with the United States to end the nearly 18-year-old war in Afghanistan is coming soon. “The US agreed to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and resolve the Afghan issue peacefully,” Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban’s chief spokesperson, told Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency (AA) on Monday. Sher Muhammad Abbas Stanekzai, the top Taliban peace negotiator, recently described the potential agreement as a victory for the terrorist group. He boasted that the Taliban brought US-led foreign forces to “their knees” in war, VOA learned from a video disseminated Saturday by media outlets friendly to the terrorist group. “I believe that Americans will leave Afghanistan very soon. Americans stand defeated, and Afghanistan will again be liberated,” Stanekzai declared.

USA - America’s values are shifting at a pace that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before. During the 2020 election season, we are going to hear a lot about “the generation gap”, and the numbers clearly tell us that this gap is very, very real. And as older generations of Americans slowly die off, it appears inevitable that the values that are dominant among younger generations of Americans are going to become the values of the country as a whole. Essentially, “American values” are going to mean something completely different from what they meant to previous generations, and that should absolutely terrify all of us.

EUROPE - First they came for central banks, then they came for government bonds, then they came for rich depositors. Then they came for me. Negative interest rates are coming for us all, in one form or another, as central banks redouble their efforts to avert a global economic slowdown that threatens to unleash deflation. So how can we defend ourselves from the coming assault on our bank balances? How long before even lower balances are subject to monetary assault? This threatens to be a key political controversy in coming months. Negative rates send “a completely wrong signal and lead to a running down of savings,” Soeder told Bild newspaper this week.

NEW ZEALAND - The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) slashed its interest rate by a drastic 0.5 per cent (50 basis points) earlier this month, to 1 per cent. RBNZ governor Adrian Orr then declared that New Zealand was prepared to follow Japan, Sweden and other countries that have gone below zero into negative interest rates, and is also thinking about quantitative easing and helicopter money — basically the full suite of extreme measures to prop up the financial system. NZ already has the world’s most explicit and extreme “bail-in” system to take deposits to prop up failing banks, called Open Bank Resolution (OBR). They won’t admit it, but this sudden escalation in RBNZ’s actions and rhetoric is a strong indication that NZ’s authorities fear their economy is heading off a cliff. As NZ is such a small country, these developments are hard to disguise, so outsiders should pay attention to what is happening there, because it is certain the same thinking is under way in other countries, especially in NZ’s close cousin across the ditch, Australia.

FRANCE - The list of issues for this year's G7 summit is long, with escalating trade tensions with the US, the UK's pending exit from the EU and fires in the Amazon looming over leaders as they gather in southern France. Anxieties over trade war and climate change hung heavy as world leaders gathered, in the resort town of Biarritz, in southern France, for the start of this year's G7 summit on Saturday — with low hopes of leaders reaching a consensus by the end of the three-day meeting. French President Emmanuel Macron, who is hosting the summit in the resort town of Biarritz, said one of his main objectives is to "convince all our partners that tensions, especially trade tensions, are bad for everyone."